Container Scheduling Strategy Based on Image Layer Reuse and Sequential Arrangement in Mobile Edge Computing

In Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) scenarios, computational tasks are popularly deployed using containerization to isolate the runtime environment. To complete the execution of the task, the edge server first pulls the image, then instantiates and runs the container. Since it takes a lot of time for the edge server to download the image from the cloud, image reuse reduces the pulling latency significantly. However, the limited storage capacity of edge servers hinders image reuse. Recent works have enhanced reuse efficiency by leveraging the hierarchical structure of images and caching high-value layers. However, their efficiency remains limited due to the lack of multi-container collaboration. This paper proposes a novel container scheduling strategy based on image layer reuse and sequence arrangement (ILR-SA) for MEC scenarios, which achieves efficient scheduling by collaborating multiple containers. First, containers are greedily deployed into the edge cluster. Then, the execution sequence of containers is modeled as an optimal Hamiltonian path problem, efficiently solved by our proposed decomposition algorithm. Finally, an efficient image layer update strategy is used to achieve layer reuse. We conduct rigorous experiments to demonstrate that our proposed container scheduling strategy reduces the computational task completion time by up to 91.3% compared to existing approaches.